An online journal published by Little Toller Books that offers writers and artists a dedicated space in which to explore and celebrate the landscapes we live in. Our contributors are encouraged to go forth and find distinctive visions that startle us, rural or urban, modern or prehistoric, industrial, post-industrial, fantastical, natural, political, however they come. But each must be meaningful, surprising, felt.

An online journal published by Little Toller Books that offers writers and artists a dedicated space in which to explore and celebrate the landscapes we live in. Our contributors are encouraged to go forth and find distinctive visions that startle us, rural or urban, modern or prehistoric, industrial, post-industrial, fantastical, natural, political, however they come. But each must be meaningful, surprising, felt.

Uprooted by Robert Macfarlane & Adrian Cooper

Over the coming days and weeks The Clearing will be publishing Lie of the Land, a series of responses to the Referendum exploring what leaving the EU could mean for conservation, wildlife and our relationship with the land. Please add your voice by posting comments below or submitting a longer contribution – either in images or words – to The Clearing editors.

Amid the political clamour of the last three weeks since the Referendum, a disturbing silence. No one in power has yet spoken of the implications of Leave for more-than-human nature in these islands of ours. For conservation, for wildlife, for landscape in its broad sense. Perhaps we are naive to expect anything more.

As the farce unfolds in Westminster, as our party system self-decapitates into a headless hydra, and the full extent of Leave’s ‘Goodbye, Good Riddance And We’ll Work Out The Details Later’ ethos becomes clear, nature has been booted even further down the political priority list than before. Cameron is gone, Theresa May crowned, the motley-Cabinet appointed, and the signs all suggest that Brexit will offer the perfect mandate to dispose of the ‘green crap’ that Cameron famously disdained.

Each day here in the island group we precariously call Britain, the UK or the British Isles, we wake to strange new smoke signals, wafted above Westminster rooftops, mostly resistant to interpretation or futurology, but alarming in their outlines. July 11th, 2016, Ken Clarke on the Today programme notes that Theresa May will deal with the important issues first, and ‘the things she knows backwards, like the environment’, last. July 14th 2016, the Department for Energy and Climate Change is abolished and Andrea Leadsom is appointed as the new Minister for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which The Evening Standard describes as “a relatively minor Cabinet post”. Andrea Leadsom, Secretary of State for Environment – who is pro-fracking, pro-forest sell-off, pro-fox hunting with dogs, and who in 2015 asked her officials “if climate change really exists”.

Oliver Rackham more than once observed that “The most difficult task in the whole of art is to draw a tree.” “Any picture of a tree,” he continued, “has to leave out most of the detail.” The same can be said of bees, otters, raptors, reptiles…all are beyond our drawing. Our record suggests that we are just too pre-occupied with our own needs, our ambitions, unable to focus politically and in detail on the other forms of life with which we share the land.

It is still shocking to read that 46 per cent of ancient semi-natural woodland in the UK was either destroyed or replaced with conifers between 1933 and 1983. Individual trees were killed by being pierced with large ‘Jim-Gem’ injectors containing ‘2-4-5 T’ (a derivative of ‘Agent orange’), or by the hacking of billhook-wounds into which Ammonium Sulphamate crystals were rubbed. Yet the visual and historic loss during those notorious “locust years” is abstract to many of us, to those who didn’t grow up in those woods, through those times. The same can be said of elm, as Rackham (again) pointed out: “Since the last Elm Disease a new generation has grown up to accept the absence of big elms as normal.”

Can we only mourn what is known to us, lost in our lifetime? Is that really how far our empathy and anxiety stretches? Perhaps ours is a generation twice estranged: estranged from the physical knowing of certain species in the landscape, estranged again from the thinking that justified and planned the mass-poisoning of woodland trees. What our generation does know, however, is the consequences of habitat loss across these islands: as the RSPB’s recent State of Nature report made chillingly clear, we are now living through the drastic decline of woodland species of butterflies, birds, invertebrate species and flowering plants.

The impact of human actions on a landscape and on nature is unpredictable, difficult to anticipate, and can take generations to express itself. The certainty that politicians sell in order to grab our votes does not fit the natural world, where nuance and complexity thrive. It is possible to revive the remnants of a once-poisoned ancient woodland, to ‘right’ the mistakes of the past – as is the case of Chalkney Wood, in Essex, which today “looks for all the world like an unmolested ancient wood” (as Simon Leatherdale of the Forestry Commission says). But the full impact that one generation of leaders and policy-makers has on wildlife and different habitats cannot be accounted for or tidily measured by the next.

This is one vital value of creating durable legal frameworks for the environment. They are not – or should not – be created to squeeze tax from business and industry. They are meant to disembody each generation from the ideas and needs of their time, protecting wildlife from the unchecked exploitation of those human neighbours.

The UK’s framework for environmental legislation, and much of the funding for conservation in the UK, comes from Europe. The system as it stood was far from perfect, and there is a troubling contradiction in the idea that attitudes towards nature and its ‘management’ can be centralised. Yet 70% of safeguards protecting what is left of the living world in the UK are EU in origin; so too some of the most ambitious and successful international conservation initiatives – EU Natura 2000, say, or the Birds and Habitat Directives. EU money has poured into conservation projects and research in the UK: successful marshland habitat creation projects on Orford Ness, for instance, or the €12m granted last year to help conserve critical English upland wetland areas. Natural England, a body set up in 2006 as “the government’s adviser for the natural environment in England, helping to protect England’s nature and landscapes for people to enjoy and for the services they provide” receives up to 80% of its funding from the EU. The EU-wide moratorium on neonicotinoid use, fought against so hard by the NFU, will surely now be revoked in Britain. Air pollution, water quality, biodiversity loss, climate change, habitat destruction: these are Anthropocene-scale problems that need cross-border solutions – and in which human well-being and more-than-human well-being are inseparably entangled.

The signs and portents of the past three weeks suggest that more-than-human life will be of little concern in the coming politics and that ‘nature’ will be sent – to paraphrase Obama – right to the back of the queue. Some EU legislation – like the Birds and Habitats Directive – may remain as UK law, simply because it is too expensive and bothersome to untangle and replace with something home-grown. But as Britain shakes itself down legislatively, in advance of building itself up again, losses will be felt, pressures will grow.

We need – urgently need, more than ever before in our lifetimes – progressive voices to speak up for the importance of nature in Britain’s future. Should UK’s grassland, hedges, woodlands or rivers, like the Whanganui River on North Island in New Zealand, be entitled to a legal identity? Other than rewilding, what other attitudes to land management can recognise the autonomy of nature? How can we shift the human horizon, both culturally and legally, to see beyond the immediate needs of each generation? Greenpeace has just launched an appeal for questions about the environment to be put to Theresa May: you can add to the list here. Join charities and pressure groups large (Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF) and small (Action for Conservation, Common Ground). Be active in your home and in your community: read, write, talk, walk, argue, lobby, work out where opportunities exist for advance (the reform of the CAP) and where ground must not be given (air pollution legislation). Add idea to idea, voice to voice, make a murmuration: create some sense, perhaps, of hope or of traction or of action. The least we can do is make noise, fill the silence.

Robert Macfarlane is a writer known for his explorations of the relationship between people and place, and a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Adrian Cooper is a publisher at Little Toller Books and director of the arts and environmental charity Common Ground.

Beuys’ Acorn(the artwork above) was created by Ackroyd and Harvey,who have been exhibiting in contemporary art galleries, museums and public spaces worldwide for 25 years.

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THE CLEARINGisan online journal published by Little Toller Books that offers writers and artists a dedicated space in which to explore and celebrate the landscapes we live in. Our contributors are encouraged to go forth and find distinctive visions that startle us, rural or urban, modern or prehistoric, industrial, post-industrial, fantastical, natural, political, however they come. But each must be meaningful, surprising, felt.

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Submissions

The editors welcome original submissions in all written, audio and visual genres. Submission should reflect The Clearing/Little Toller’s concern with the natural environment, but within this broad subject-matter we encourage a diversity of interpretation and approach.

9 Comments

Thank you for this excellent summary of nature’s problems in a post-Brexit Great Britain. It’s important now that people are positive in their local community and enact conservation measures, many of which are supported by the UK’s EU membership through the legislation you mention. With this in mind would it not have been better to promote the work of the Wildlife Trusts or the RSPB? That instead of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, or WWF, who have little to no direct relationship with or impact upon the state of our landscape in Britain. Of course, we can all spend our days retweeting and liking posts on social media, but real change only happens when a meaningful connection is made with the landscape and its inhabitants. The only way that people can well and truly understand and connect with nature is to work with it directly, to establish a relationship with a place and understand what sustains that place. Here’s hoping that we can all make something positive from ominous circumstances.

Thank you for getting in touch, Daniel. We wholeheartedly agree that conservation at a community level is where the majority of us can engage and make a difference to the local environment. Often, the arguments which take place at global or EU level don’t seem to connect to us on a daily basis. It is the deeply-forged and more intimate relationships with places that inspire community action when aspects of the local environment come under pressure, which is why we mention small, grassroots organisations like Common Ground and Action for Conservation. There are of course many similar organisation – large and small – dedicated to local conservation, and it is through joining or supporting them that we can express our own beliefs and make a real difference.

Hi Daniel – I strongly support what you have written her about direct contact with nature as the only way that people can truly understand. We all need to establish a relationship with a place ind understand what sustains that place.

Great to read some thoughtful consideration of Brexit and nature. Need to point out, though, that ”the island group we precariously call Britain, the UK or the British Isles’ doesn’t factor in the Republic of Ireland, which is part of the island group and will remain in the EU (particularly in light of David Davis’s recent and scary reference to an ‘internal’ border). Given that nature acts across national borders, I’d be keen to hear some consideration of this too.

The vote for Brexit was a disastrous mistake for the UK generally, and it also has the potential to destabilise Northern Ireland. If the Tories push ahead with the decision and leave the EU, this will inevitably create the context for a new referendum in Scotland, which the SNP are likely to win in this new political climate.

Scotland’s departure would be tantamount to the break-up of the United Kingdom, leaving Northern Ireland in a geographically anomalous position. There are already voices being raised in Northern Ireland for a border poll, or a referendum on Irish reunification. These constitutional debates were effectively put to bed by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and Northern Ireland has functioned reasonably well as a civil society since then, with a power-sharing executive. The spectre of a border poll raises the temperature again, and cuts across the atmosphere of cordial relations among Irish partners to the Good Friday settlement, including staunch unionists (DUP) and the Irish government.

The idea that a democratic majority in Northern Ireland could vote for and secure Irish reunification is a dangerous illusion. It is an illusion nurtured by the demographic drift towards a Catholic majority in the province. Even if the proposal were carried by a small majority, it would provoke a fierce backlash from loyalists, whose paramilitaries would rise to the occasion. Their adherence to a British identity makes Nigel Farage look like a sissy, and it would again find murderous expression in the intimate, stifling mosaic of tribal divisions that is Northern Ireland generally, and Belfast in particular.

Many people in Ireland recognise this to be the case, but British experience has shown that rash political decisions can lead to a referendum with unforseen consequences. The political mainstream in the Republic does not want a referendum on Irish unity: they value the achievements of the 1998 settlement and will protect those as a priority.

It’s hard to think about this without getting thoroughly downhearted… I wish there were some inspired answer to the problem so well stated above.The worry about what would happen to all the conservation laws, initiatives, funding etc from the EU was one of my first thoughts after the referendum, along with how the arts might suffer. In some ways I feel they share some similiarites – arts and nature know and need no boundaries of country or of continent, and it is to their detriment to impose any, except in as far as natural (rather than enforced) boundaries occur. The problem I think is largely that, at one remove, or at five (in the case of the majority of politicians, I suspect) removes from nature, how will anyone care enough to make this a priority? Of course including such things in education from an early age is crucial, but it won’t help in this case. Even as someone who always did care and used to work in nature conservation (mostly living in a city), and now does not work in conservation (officially speaking, anyway), and lives in the country, I can vouch for the fact that my caring for nature, the environment and everything existing within those words, and how we interact with them, has increased a hundredfold at least, just because I am surrounded by it every day of the year, and interact with it daily. It is personal. If it is not personal, it’s too easy to ignore. I think getting ‘up-close’ is the only way anything can really come to matter deeply to anyone, but how does one get that into Westminster? Surely just statistically there have to be at least a few people over there who REALLY REALLY care enough to make a noise loud enough for those ultimately in power to have to listen?

Although I live in Cape Town, I have recently spent four weeks in the UK and will be returning regularly each year to spend time exploring your beautiful countryside. I have just read ‘Uprooted’ and was very moved by the sentiments and concerns expressed in your article. Upon finishing, Polly Higgins came to mind (http://pollyhiggins.com/) as she too cares deeply about the environment and our impact on the natural world, and with a background in earth law, perhaps she might be a person to chat to, to look at how to become more involved in, or even have a say, in the policy and decision making in Andrea Leadsom’s department. As this is a critical time for all that is wild and free in our world, I feel strongly that there is little time for complacency and was therefore greatly encouraged by your article and hope that it reaches a wide audience.

Congrats. for initiating this discourse giving voice to such passionate opinion.
Parliament seems to be packed with prowling Dobermans and squabbling magpies;
meanwhile so called ‘green’ schemes eg wind-farms and re-afforestation of moorlands
is destroying beyond repair remote but critical habitats through hard core access tracks
and disruption of natural drainage; while also shrinking our few remaining ‘wilderness’ areas.
Who is fuelling this desecration?